Biased Major and Minor Quotes  

“Implicit bias is not a new way of calling someone a racist.” (Introduction)

—Jennifer Eberhardt 

Analysis: A core message of Biased is that implicit bias is an inevitable by-product of the way the human brain works. That is, people’s choices lie not in whether or not to have biases in the first place but in how to account for, respond to, and mitigate those biases. The fact that people tend to form quick judgments—especially about those deemed “outside” their own group—is not, Eberhardt emphasizes, automatic evidence of a moral failing, intellectual laziness, or a consciously held prejudice. Here, she takes care to point out that the recognition of implicit bias is not an accusation of wrongdoing, nor is it a new weapon to be wielded in the contentious rhetoric surrounding race in the United States. 

This does not mean, however, that Eberhardt deems it acceptable to say, “Everyone has bias,” and leave it at that. Rather, as she proceeds to argue throughout the book, implicit bias can and should be countered by recognizing where it is likely to do harm. In high-stakes areas such as policing and criminal justice, Eberhardt suggests that clear and consistent rules can help prevent bias from leading to stereotypical thinking or discriminatory treatment. She maintains that individuals, governments, and even corporations have a role to play in recognizing and addressing implicit bias.  

“The brain is not a hardwired machine.” (Chapter 1)

—Jennifer Eberhardt 

Analysis: Here, Eberhardt refers to the concept of neuroplasticity: the brain’s demonstrated ability to grow, change, and reshape its neural pathways over time. Because the brain is not “hardwired,” it can take new experiences into account and change the way it perceives the world, including the categories that it puts people into. This does not mean that the brain can “rewire” itself out of bias altogether, but it does mean that specific biases can be overridden through training and exposure. The “other-race effect,” for instance, is attenuated by greater exposure to and interaction with people of other races. 

To illustrate how neuroplasticity can change a person’s view of the world, Eberhardt offers the example of London cabdrivers, who must learn an enormous and mazelike city layout to determine efficient ways of getting their riders from one place to another. Nobody is born with this sort of in-depth knowledge, and very few people passively acquire it in day-to-day life. Rather, cabdrivers acquire their mental map of London over a span of a few intensive years in adulthood. Likewise, people of any occupation can learn to make finer distinctions as they gain more and more exposure to a geographic setting, a body of knowledge, or even a group of people. 

“Stereotypes do not need to be explained to be understood or reproduced.” (Chapter 2)

—Jennifer Eberhardt 

Analysis: As Eberhardt shows through stories of her own parental experiences, children can easily assimilate stereotypes even if nobody sits them down and makes those stereotypes explicit. The book opens, in fact, with an anecdote in which Eberhardt’s then–five-year-old son worries that a Black man (who, he opines, “looks like Daddy”) will rob the airplane they are flying on. The unthinking ease with which children imitate biased behaviors is one reason that it is essential to educate children about bias. Adults, too, can pick up on the stereotypes that underlie the actions of those around them, as the German-born police officer in Chapter 4 learned when he began to emulate the racial profiling behaviors of his colleagues. 

By the same token, as Eberhardt points out in Chapter 6, a stereotype that was once wielded as a tool of explicit racism can persist long after it is denounced as unacceptable. Individuals who would never openly avow racist ideas may nonetheless make subconscious associations between Black people and apes (a phenomenon Eberhardt and other psychologists terms the “black-ape association”) or between Black men and criminality (the “black-crime association”). These stereotypes spread even among people who would call them out as racist if used in a cartoon, joke, or social media post. 

“I think even law enforcement doesn’t recognize the people behind the walls.” (Chapter 4)

—LeRonne Armstrong 

Analysis: In this chapter, LeRonne Armstrong of the Oakland Police Department describes the causes and effects of poor community–police relations. Having witnessed that relationship from both sides as an Oakland native who became a police officer, Armstrong is frustrated by what he describes as a vicious cycle of mutual distrust and suspicion. When law-abiding members of the community do not trust the police to protect them, they are less likely to assist in the investigation of crimes—even violent crimes that personally affect them. They may be angry and dismayed about the violence and disorder in their neighborhood, but they feel that speaking up will make them vulnerable to both the police and the criminals. 

This leads to the situation described in the quotation: police officers come to see the community at large as indifferent to the crime taking place around them. They fail to recognize the reasons that people may not come forward with information or respond to questioning. Then, armed with the attitude that nobody else cares, police officers easily slip into a habit of treating everyone they encounter on patrol as an adversary, a suspect, an accomplice. This further solidifies community members’ resentment toward the police, and the cycle continues. 

“Some of us are doing life. I think we can handle a little red-pen criticism.” (Chapter 5)

—Unnamed student in Eberhardt’s class 

Analysis: In recounting her time teaching a psychology class at San Quentin State Prison, Eberhardt shows herself in a moment of vulnerability, with her own biases initially getting in the way of her efforts to serve her students. Throughout Biased, Eberhardt promotes the message that bias is to some extent inevitable but addressing it and mitigating its harms are morally urgent tasks. Here, she shows how someone who studies bias for a living can nonetheless fall prey to it, but she also gives an example of how to overcome bias and shows why doing so is important. 

In critiquing her students’ work, Eberhardt fears that she is being too harsh and that her students—all inmates—will be demoralized by her candid feedback. What she initially fails to recognize is that these inmates are unlike the majority of her Stanford students, who have often been praised for their intellectual achievements from a young age. Teaching at Stanford, in other words, has set Eberhardt’s expectations for how students are likely to receive criticism on an essay. Yet as the student quoted here points out, people serving a long prison sentence are not necessarily used to a steady diet of positive feedback. They are more capable of dealing with criticism than she initially gives them credit for, and they actually benefit more if she is forthright and detailed about how they can improve. 

“Sure, it was depressing work. But I’d come to realize that I wasn’t bound to the misery . . .” (Chapter 6)

—Jennifer Eberhardt 

Analysis: Toward the end of Chapter 6, Eberhardt dives into the history of “scientific” racism and shares with the reader the long history of using anthropology to try to justify racial inequality. She also touches on the “black-ape association” and its persistence both as a source of crude jokes and as an insidious, widely held stereotype. Biased is concerned with weighty societal problems, and Part II offers an unrelenting inventory of injustices fueled by bias. Conducting detailed research into bias, then attempting to share that research with a sometimes-unwilling audience, is “depressing work.”  

Here, however, Eberhardt points out that the “misery” caused by racism and perpetuated by bias is not the whole story. Bias research and training can also have a hopeful dimension, in that both help society to overcome inequities past and present. From her own research and that of her colleagues, Eberhardt knows that the human brain—and hence the human mind—can change dramatically over an individual’s lifetime. Thus, educating people about bias and its dangers can have a real, positive effect on their thoughts and behavior. For Eberhardt, this message of hope is especially urgent as political polarization heightens our tendency to suspect the worst of one another. 

“When there’s more thoughtfulness and less defensiveness, honest conversations about race are possible.” (Chapter 7)

—Jennifer Eberhardt 

Analysis: Much of Chapter 7 concerns housing, a domain of American life that has historically been subject to extensive segregation. Because people feel a sense of ownership, belonging, and community around where they live, they can often be quite defensive when perceived outsiders are detected in their neighborhood. On platforms like Nextdoor, this leads to incidents in which a potentially well-meaning resident in a predominantly white neighborhood reports a “suspicious person” of another race, only to be accused of racism. In the online arguments that result, everyone ends up feeling misunderstood, and neighborly relations unilaterally worsen. 

This sort of episode, says Eberhardt, underscores the need for “thoughtfulness” in any dialogue that may have a racial dimension. Those making a suspicious-person report, for example, need to reflect on whether the person’s actual behavior is suspicious or whether they simply do not “look like” a resident of the neighborhood. (In the latter case, the report is perhaps best left unfiled.) More broadly, Eberhardt contends that people need to be aware of their biases and mindful that others, too, have biases of their own. This leads to less “defensiveness” if one’s own actions are construed as potentially biased, and it prevents the immediate leap to accusations of racism if someone else makes a hasty judgment. 

“Both the biased and the target of bias are forced to dwell in the roles they play.” (Chapter 8)

—Jennifer Eberhardt 

Analysis: Discussions of social justice often center on who benefits at whose expense. In Biased, many examples show systems and practices that benefit the white majority at the expense of their Black counterparts. Some of these situations, at least considered individually, appear to be a zero-sum game: only one person gets the job, the promotion, the house, or the scholarship. In other cases, such as “stop and frisk” policing, the “target of bias” suffers without any immediate ill effect on those enacting the biased behavior. 

With this statement, however, Eberhardt makes a different point: often, biased behavior has no “winner” at all and simply harms everyone involved. This seems ultimately to have been the case for Bernice Donald’s high school algebra teacher, who lived for decades with the knowledge that he had treated his student unfairly even as she went on to a distinguished career in law. In the book as a whole, Eberhardt is understandably most concerned with the “targets of bias,” the people who suffer directly from their contact with unfair systems of education, justice, and employment. Here, she asks the reader to consider the ways in which bias is a negative-sum game, one that not only harms some more than others but causes more harm than good overall. 

“The minute we stop fighting back, that’s the minute bigotry wins.” (Chapter 9)

—DaShanne Stokes 

Analysis: In her trip to Charlottesville, Virginia, to learn about the causes and outcomes of the “Unite the Right” rally, Eberhardt sees this quotation chalked onto a memorial for Heather Heyer, who was fatally injured when a rally attendee rammed a group of counterprotesters with his truck. The quotation comes from sociologist and speaker Dr. DaShanne Stokes, who is known primarily for his work as an advocate for Indigenous religious freedom. In the context of the memorial to Heyer, “fighting back” took the form of an explicit and direct protest against flagrant displays of bigotry.

However, the quotation also fits in with Eberhardt’s broader message about the necessity of confronting bias. It is necessary, she argues, to fight back not only against overt bigotry but also against the effects of implicit bias. The former can draw on the latter to perpetuate itself, so recognizing and checking one’s biases is one way of undercutting bigoted behavior. Moreover, even without racist slogans or acts of terrorism, implicit bias can perpetuate systemic injustices, allowing the effects of bigotry to persist long after its worst excesses are denounced. The task of fighting back against these subtler forms of discrimination is a continual one that, Eberhardt argues, concerns all members of society. 

“[A]ddressing bias is not just a personal choice; it is a social agenda, a moral stance.” (Conclusion)

—Jennifer Eberhardt 

Analysis: In the conclusion to Biased, Eberhardt comes full circle and restates her argument that although bias is an inherent feature of human cognition, addressing bias is a choice. Here, she adds that this choice is about more than personal ethics, feeling good about oneself, or defending oneself from allegations of racism. Because implicit bias has fueled many of the inequities in modern society, there is a moral and social dimension to facing and mitigating it. Allowing bias to go unchecked means, in effect, allowing injustice to flourish. 

Furthermore, Eberhardt is clear that this statement applies not only to explicit bigotry of the sort widely denounced in popular and social media. It applies to implicit bias, which is harder to detect and easier to dismiss as a factor in one’s thinking. Many people who do not believe themselves to be prejudiced nonetheless allow implicit bias to influence how they think, speak, and behave. Thus, it is critical that both individuals and institutions work to keep bias in check. For the private individual, this may mean rethinking notions about which neighborhoods are “safe” and “clean” (Chapter 7). For a human resources manager, it could mean developing a structured interview process that allows all applicants to speak directly to their qualifications, with less emphasis on whether the candidate is a “culture fit” for the organization.